Alaska’s Senate race won’t go to a runoff, like Louisiana’s will or Georgia’s might. And there isn’t the possibility of an independent winning, like in Kansas, to complicate predictions of which party will win a majority.
But Alaska—where Democratic Senator Mark Begich faces Republican Dan Sullivan—can throw its own monkey wrench into the Senate-majority sweepstakes.
Absentee ballots can be postmarked on election day and officials won’t begin counting them until a week after the election, on Nov. 11, according to the elections schedule. Keep in mind how big Alaska is: about 571,000 square miles in land area, more than twice as big as Texas, with vast rural swaths. It’s more than 1,000 miles from Ketchikan, in the southeastern part of the state, to Barrow, the northernmost U.S. city.
Alaska is known as a difficult state to poll; the average of the most recent surveys has Sullivan ahead in a state that President Barack Obama lost by 14 percentage points in the 2012 election.
See Full Story at Bloomberg.com
